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Monday, 29 May 2006

The Shorter, Faster, Cruder, Tinier TV Show

Randy Kennedy writes:

... By the most optimistic counts, there are only about 3 million people
out of the almost 200 million cellphone users in the United States who
now watch video on their phones. Other analysts say the number of those
who watch regularly is much lower, which leads them to ask whether
people really want another version of television, one they can
literally take anywhere. Judging by what is happening in other parts of
the world, where the mobile-television experiment is well under way,
the more pertinent questions are: What are they going to want to watch?
Will it be regular live television, redirected to their phones? Or
typical television fare, edited and re-packaged to suit a screen
smaller than a business card? It might end up being neither, but
instead a new amalgam that feels little like traditional television and
more like the increasingly video-dominated Web — like computer games,
like the kind of shaggy user-generated video and mashed-up video clips
that began as novelties for people killing time in their cubicles but
are now on their way to becoming big business. ...